It has emerged that the Premier League have put reserve prices on all seven TV packages totalling 200 matches being auctioned next month.

This practice is understood to have been in place for recent tenders but has come more into focus this time because of fears the money will flatline or even go down from £5.1billion, despite 32 more live matches per season being sold for the three campaigns from 2019-20.

The minimum prices give the Premier League the option of keeping fixtures back to produce themselves and sell direct to the consumer.

The Premier League have put reserve prices on all seven TV packages totalling 200 matches

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Amazon may enter the market to bring new competition for Sky and BT, but the industry view is the online giant will only bid for the two smaller multi-game midweek packages. It could be that Amazon wait to buy the on-demand delayed rights being sold after the live-match auction.

Meanwhile, as Sports Agenda reported before Christmas, the Premier League rights numbers will be instrumental in focusing minds over financier Amanda Staveley’s £250m bid for Newcastle.

Premier League rights numbers will be instrumental in focusing minds over Amanda Staveley's Newcastle bid

Eurosport chief executive Peter Hutton is demonstrating where he believes the future of TV sport lies by moving to San Francisco to head up Facebook’s sports rights acquisitions. However, Hutton is not leaving until after the Winter Olympics, suggesting Facebook will not bid in next month’s Premier League auction, although the social media giant remains very interested in acquiring football content in particular.

RFU transparency around their highest-paid director salaries does not extend to revealing what England head coach Eddie Jones’s two-year contract extension is worth. Jones, who is believed to earn £500,000 a year plus substantial performance-related bonuses, would only say tongue-in-cheek that his pay increase was ‘massive’.

The RFU have not revealed what England coach Eddie Jones's two-year contract deal is worth

The FA are annoyed that all talks about a winter break to aid the England team, in exchange for a midweek FA Cup competition, starts with them losing replays. They feel the Football League could start the ball rolling by reducing the two-leg Carabao Cup semi-finals to one match decided on the night.

Pele blow for university

The health issues that left Pele unable to travel to the UK for Sunday's Football Writers’ Association tribute will also disappoint Cambridge University, who were due to present him with an honorary doctorate on Monday.

Despite Pele’s absence, the FWA have lined up England manager Gareth Southgate, Cliff Jones, who played against Pele for Wales at the 1958 World Cup, Gordon Banks, who made that save from his header in 1970, and Steve Hunt, a team-mate with New York Cosmos, to speak about him.

Cambridge University were due to present Pele with an honorary doctorate on Monday

The History Channel will be taken over by football in the month leading up to the World Cup. And three English-based production companies — North One, Zig Zag and Goalhanger — have been commissioned to provide original content about the tournament’s best moments, players and coaches to be shown in 160 countries.

The ECB, despite their £1billion-plus TV rights deal, are still sharing their psychologist David Young with Championship club Wolves. And with the West Midlands side heading for the vast riches of the Premier League, it’s easy to guess with whom Young’s priorities will lie.

This year’s official FA diary continues, bizarrely, to list the partners of FA Council members — apparently so staff can address them by name. But credit the ruling body for being enlightened enough to include the male partner of British Universities representative Dominic Shellard, vice-chancellor of De Montford University.

Meanwhile, the Council this week rubber-stamped without objection all the FA reforms proposed in the wake of the Aluko-Sampson controversy.